Recording my time as a BA (Hons) Fine Art Student at Cardiff Metropolitan University – “Don’t think about making art, just get it done. Let everyone else decide if it’s good or bad, whether they love it or hate it. While they are deciding, make even more art.” – Andy Warhol

I have really enjoyed the collaboration process and could not have asked for a better group of people to create artwork with. I have been incredibly lucky in that I have made friends from collaborating as well as creating interesting artwork as a group. We immediately got on and started thinking about how we could amalgamate all of our strengths into a group project. We quickly noticed that the one thing that we had in common was drawingand set to work on researching artists that have produced collaborative drawings together. We met up numerous times to produce collaborative drawings in coffee shops and café’s as well as at university and I can confidently say that creating these drawings didn’t seem like an inconvenient effort to any of us and that we all thoroughly enjoyed spending the time creating art together. I think the secret to our success was that we kept the sessions very casual and never put too much pressure on anyone, we just took in the experienced and enjoyed each others company.

In terms of the work we created, we were all amazed by how well the drawings that we made were turning out and wanted to challenge ourselves further. We decided to incorporate mixed media into our work. We met up and each brought something to make marks with that we felt related to our discipline or sketchbook work. The pieces ended up being textural and sewn into and covered in tissue paper, drawn on top of, sketched into and painted on to create incredibly successful outcomes. We felt that all the drawings showed a little piece of each one of us and our individual projects as well as containing our journey as a group. I have learnt a lot about working with others and acquired further social skills from working with strangers. Looking back, I don’t think that anything was unsuccessful about collaborating with these people.

A few things didn’t quite go to plan like we had to rearrange meeting up sometimes and sometimes members of the group had other commitments but I quickly learnt that that’s life. The works we created have all been successful in their own right but in my opinion the most successful work is our final stop motion animation.It shows all of our drawings coming together to create one drawing, just like us individual students came together to form a collaborative art group. I had never experimented with clay before and animating it was a lot of fun. I have learnt a lot from the members of my group. Some of them used tracing paper to draw on in their sketchbooks which inspired me to incorporate its use into my photo-manipulations. It has ended up being a key component in the consolidation of my individual work and I don’t think it would have been without participating in this collaboration.

I would definitely not have produced a stop motion animation of my photo-manipulations if we hadn’t experimented with producing them as a collaborative because I’m not sure I would have been confident enough because of the sheer number of photographs that were included. I was shocked by how well our collaborative drawing animation turned out and it definitely inspired me to make one of my own as a final piece portraying the hidden loneliness of city life.

We all agreed that the journeywe have undergone has been far more important to us than the outcomes that we have created.

I have learnt so much from the collaboration process and would definitely recommend it. I feel it has taught me how to be more of a professional art practitioner from having a professional relationship with others. We enjoyed our time together but we knew we had work that we needed to get done so I feel we all learnt how to formulate a healthy balance of work and play. I am delighted to say that we all agreed that we would stay friends and that if we ever needed any artistic advice then we would all be happy to help each other out as it is always useful to obtain the opinion of students specializing in another discipline. We all went for a drink after our final presentation and reflected on what a positive experience collaboratively making art has been for each of us. I have learnt that collaboration is very give and take. You have to work together, take in the input of others and give your opinion in order to be successful.

As a group collaboration, we have produced a book, full of documentation of the journey that we have undertaken whilst producing work as a collaborative. We were just going to display the book at our final presentation so that people could look through it, but after attending a tutorial it was clear that we needed to emphasize it more. The tutors were really pleased with our book and thought it would be a shame if it was optional for people to see it and so suggested that we make a page by page video clip of the book to include within our presentation. We welcomed this suggestion:

We agree that this book is more of a piece in itself rather than something to support our collaboration because it is a collaboration, it includes work from all of us and everyone’s different handwriting makes it quite personal. We will be including this video in our final presentation.

Today, we met up as a group and decided that we would combine the two stop motions that we have worked on and produce one final animation from them.We decided it would be more successful if we integrated them rather than just playing them one after the other, so we worked on this until we were happy with the result. Below is our group collaborative final Stop motion animation:

We are incredibly pleased with the result and feel that the combination of drawing and clay work ties in all the strengths of each individual in the group and portrays our inputs from each of our disciplines as a collaboration.We will be showing this piece as part of our final presentation along with some of the drawings we have created and our collaborative documentation sketchbook.

We met up as a group today and discussed our original timetable and how to progress over the next few weeks. The original plan was to work with creating a new animation using what we’ve learnt and make a large collaborative drawing, but we got all of the work we have produced together, and didn’t realise quite how much work we have already made. We were delighted to learn that we had been enjoying this collaboration so much that we hadn’t really stepped back and looked and reflected on what we had done. Today, we decided that we will put the two animations we have already made into one video as a final animation and instead of making a large drawing, we will display 3 of the best A1 pieces we have created.

We worked on our collaborative book today and brought it up to date with documentation.

After that we wrote some written reflection and formulated an action plan up to the assessment point on the 18th March. This included mashing together our animations, reflecting, finishing documenting and creating our book and then finally, working on our final presentation to be presented to all the other collaborative groups.

Finally, we decided it would be beneficial to consolidate and conclude our book by writing about how this collaboration has influenced our own individual practice.

We each wrote a small paragraph about what we had learnt and will take away from this experience and we were delighted that every one of us had written about a positive experiencewhilst working in a collaborative group. We have worked really hard and want to enjoy celebrating what we have made and portraying that in a presentation rather than stressing out about making new things. Our work has a lot of potential and direction and that is enough for us. We are proud of ourselves and each other for what we have managed to achieve in such a short space of time working around other commitments.

Here is the Stop Motion Animation of a collaborative drawing that we all created together. We got together to create the drawing and took pictures of it from above every few seconds. It was really difficult to take a picture in exactly the same place as the previous image, and as a result the stop motion does jump around a little bit. This is only a practice animation, but when we come to make one for the final outcome, we will definitely need to set it up and use a tripod to hold the camera in place and prevent this.It is really interesting to see the development of one of our drawings through photography and animation and to be honest, as I had never animated such a large, collaborative piece before, I wasn’t really sure how it was going to turn out, but for a first attempt we all felt it was better than we expected. It really captures the journey of our drawing and highlights our collaboration by showing all the different parts of the drawing collaborating at once.

Now we have had a practice, and are happy with the process of producing Stop Motion Animations, we will produce a more professional standard of animation using a tripod to keep the camera still. We are thinking of including little clay models of people on top of the collaborative drawing (incorporating Chelsea’s ceramic influence further) and animating, then painting bits out with white paint and redrawing on top and animating that as well. We are keen to be a bit more experimental and look forward to producing a final animation piece.

We started our presentation by talking about our own individual ideas relating to The Hidden City. We realised that in terms of ideas and concepts we didn’t really have that much in common. Chelsea is looking at patterns within the city, Rachel decided to focus here attention on hidden posters and are within clubs and the night life of the city, Steph is producing her own project on cemeteries, Beth is looking at Hidden Gem’s within the city and i’m exploring loneliness in the city.

We focused on each other’s strengths, talked about where we believe our best attributes lay without much gain, so we turned to finding out what we had in common within our practices. We realised that one of our main commonalities was Drawing and decided to work with this idea. We decided that embarking on creating a sketchbook collaboratively and making a collaborative drawing was a great idea.

Researching artists that have drawn collaboratively gave us a valuable insight into how to start working collaboratively as a group. It also gave us a taste of what outcomes of collaborative drawing have previously looked like and how artists have worked together. We liked the idea of a mass drawing and rolling paper out on the floor and all getting involved.

After artistic inspiration we showed documentation of our first collaborative drawing session in the form of images. We portrayed the journey and took pictures of us as a group working on it as well as just the drawing. The outcomes looked really interesting projected on the wall, which heightened our ideas about maybe projecting a video behind our final outcome.

The presentation was highly successful in my opinion, We had a clear idea to present, presented it confidently and demonstrated good collaboration. We were all really pleased as a group.

FEEDBACK

Here is the feedback sheet we got from our tutors and peers within the larger field group.

All the feedback we received was really positive, which we were incredibly happy about. We are glad people recognised that we had worked hard and successfully collaborated as a group. We also thought it was good advice that we were told to grow on each others drawing skills and look at mediums from each other’s differences to work with.We are excited to continue our collaboration.

After discovering that our commonality was drawing, researching artists as a group and producing collaborative drawings together, we have come up with a manifesto, a proposed idea about what we would like to create as an outcome for this collaboration.

We would like to experiment with collaborative drawing in a variety of ways. We want to get a feel for drawing together and look at our drawings in a new light. It will be interesting to see how our drawings work in relation to each others and whether the meaning or ideas behind them change. We plan to draw together every week and become more experimental as we go along.

We are thinking about creating an A3 size book, full of our own drawings, our inspirations, collaborative artist research and collaborative drawings that we have produced together. In terms of a final outcome, this book could be displayed on a plinth or in a case as part of the piece. We also plan to document everything we do through photography and video. To us the journey of us creating the work together is becoming more important than the final outcome.

We want our own practices to come together in these drawings, they will include illustrative and graphic drawings with fine liner pens and other mediums, expressive charcoal drawing and paint, clay and glazes, fabric and stitch work and versatile pencil drawing so that there is a textiles element, fine art element, ceramics element and illustration and graphics element. This will show all our disciplines collaborating and coming together.

We are keen to experiment with drawing on a large-scale. We plan to use a roll of lining paper or other large surface to create a mass collaborative piece, including materials from our own disciplines. We want to include all our ideas on the hidden city and watch them unfold all together on the paper in one large homage to the city itself.

Inspired by the work of William Kentridge, we would like to produce Stop motion animation of our drawings. It is something we have started thinking about and have also considered making video’s/animations of us creating the drawings together. We thought that us moving around the drawing could resemble people moving around the city.

Our final outcome will be a large-scale homage of the city, drawn collaboratively, A stop motion animation projected on the wall next to or behind the large drawing and our journey and idea’s documented and displayed in a book, hand bound by the textiles members of our group on a plinth.

We are excited about the prospect of producing this work and have already started experimenting. We have formulated a rough time-table to help us manage the time we have and adhere to our goals:

We have already Started collaboration, considered each other’s strengths, considered what we have in common and decided we want to produce collaborative drawings. We have also done a collaborative drawing session and met up to discuss progressions.

Week 6 – Start experimenting with stop motion animation, meet up and produce one large A1 size drawing as a start taking pictures every few seconds to make the animation. Play with what kind of sound we would like to play whilst the animation runs.

Week 7 – Meet up and produce individual drawings, print and write up artist research and start formulating the collaborative book. Use it as a sort of diary of what we have done, as well as to demonstrate our skills as individuals and as a collaboration.

Week 8– Make a Large scale collaborative drawing or drawings on lining paper or mass surface. Document this process with photographs and video/animation

Week 9 – Finish making everything we have set out to do, tidy up any loose ends and prepare for our final presentation of our work – a book on plinth or in case, a large collaborative drawing and a projected animation or video.